Housing mobility issues aired at Montgomery County Community College, Whitpain

WHITPAIN — The panel of housing experts at a seminar on housing mobility at Montgomery County Community College Thursday emphasized the myriad challenges that poor people confront when they attempt to move out of “minimum-opportunity” towns like Norristown and Pottstown.

“Philadelphia has a large percentage of households living in poverty,” said Mary Bell, manager of demographic and economic analysis at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. “That includes the suburban towns like Norristown, Pottstown and Coatesville. These maps indicate there are households there that need help with housing.”

Bell explained that inner-city towns have a diminishing tax base that prevents city officials from having the financial resources and extra workers needed to serve an impoverished school system and needy students.

“Communities that have the least financial capacity to help residents have the largest number of people that need the services,” she said. “There is no opportunity to move out where there are better schools and better jobs. People live where they can afford to live.”

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Bell recommended that the current Pennsylvania property tax structure be investigated to determine whether legislative changes could increase the yield of tax revenue for inner-city Pennsylvania towns that need additional help.

“There should be a better regional balance between affordable housing opportunities and jobs,” she said.

A complete video presentation of the seminar, titled “Moving to Higher Opportunity: Exploring Options and Opportunities for Housing Mobility,” will be on the www.hud.gov/pennsylvania website starting the week of Jan. 17, according to an official from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

About 350 community leaders and housing advocates attended the all-day housing seminar at the college.

David Rusk, founding president of Building One America and former mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., described the opportunity mapping of 237 townships, boroughs in the Philadelphia region that measured the good jobs, schools, tax bases and neighborhoods to make a qualitative comparison. The region was divided into maximum opportunity towns (23); high opportunity towns (37); medium opportunity towns (43); low opportunity towns; minimum opportunity towns (75) and Philadelphia.

“Maximum-opportunity towns like Upper and Lower Merion have large job markets and high-performing schools,” Rusk said. “High-opportunity towns include East Goshen, Limerick, Lower Providence and Upper Dublin. The medium-opportunity towns include West Chester, Media, Cheltenham and Jenkintown, and the students there are at risk. The low-opportunity towns include East and West Norriton and Lansdale. The minimum-opportunity towns have high rates of poverty and low-performing schools. They include Norristown, Pottstown and Chester.”

Pennsylvania Housing Choice Vouchers (HCVs) are distributed in suburban municipalities in inverse proportion to a Municipal Opportunity Index, according to Rusk. Eighty-two percent of housing vouchers are used by recipients in minimum- opportunity towns, while just 2 percent are used in maximum-opportunity towns.

A relevant example is the municipality of Norristown, Rusk said.

Forty-six percent of the Housing Choice Vouchers used in Montgomery County — about 1,200 — are used in Norristown, according to 2008 statistics from HUD, the most recent available. There are about 2,500 HCVs in Montgomery County.

Rusk estimated that between 15 and 20 percent of the housing units in Norristown are federally subsidized.

“With our high number of housing vouchers in Norristown, this housing summit is important,” said Arlene Gordon, the president of the Gordon Community Development Association in Norristown. “We need to start new development, especially in Norristown.

The proportion of “free and reduced-price meals are 37 percent in the minimum-opportunity towns and 77 percent in Philadelphia,” Rusk said. “Economic segregation drives school opportunity. Economic segregation drives poor school performance.”

Officials of Montgomery County, Md., made a conscious decision several decades ago to locate the recipients of housing vouchers into every rich, maximum-opportunity town to give those families and their children the well-run schools that improve school performance,” Rusk said.

“Fundamentally, Montgomery County, Md., has created mixed schools by changing the location of poor students,” he said. “Economic integration is the most powerful educational intervention to improve poor students educational performance.”

Rusk was critical of the success of the war on poverty by federal officials.

“This is the 50th anniversary of the war on poverty. It has been successful for the elderly. Federal policy tried to rebuild the high poverty areas but gentrification has pushed poor people out,” Rusk said. “Jobs continue to move outward out of the city neighborhoods.”

Philip Garboden, a doctoral student of sociology at John Hopkins University, talked about field interviews with poor families and their children in Mobile, Ala., and Baltimore, Md., from 2009 to 2013. He said that poor families had little time to complete a search for available apartments where landlords were willing to accept housing vouchers and frequently broken elements of the apartments made them uninhabitable.

Problems getting transportation can limit apartment searches to the inner city that exclude suburban possibilities.

“When you have to leave your unit quickly you are not going to tour 50 other units,” he said. “The search strategies that are effective in the inner city don’t work in the suburbs because housing is spread out. Landlords do not have to accept a housing voucher.”

Jennifer Lee O’Neil of the Quadel Consulting Corp. said that every housing authority operates a little differently and that enforcement of the federal rules for housing vouchers is not aggressive.

“That affects people with disabilities and well over 30 percent nationally have disabilities,” she said.

Frequently, complaints about landlords not following the voucher rules are not filed because the process is too burdensome, O’Neil said.